Parking enforcement operations account for a significant portion of public revenue in towns and cities. This revenue is generated both directly, from ticketing and fee collection at curbside or in garages and lots, and indirectly, from higher turnover rates resulting in increased sales taxes. Yet cities estimate that only 1% to 5% of violations are ticketed using existing enforcement tools and methods. Current enforcement methods are patrol-based, and involve either on-site checking of parked cars against payment information, indicated by a variety of payment systems, including single and multi-space meters and pay-and-display kiosks, or chalking-and-checking parked cars at unmetered curbside. These current methods are inefficient, because they provide no means to identify violations or measure usage remotely, and hence have no data to optimize parking control officer routes. Further, the lack of accurate real-time and historical information on curbside usage patterns prevents cities and private parking managers from measuring parking demand and formulating suitable parking policies.
From a user perspective, existing systems for payment are inconvenient. Few drivers carry the amount of change necessary to pay current rates at coin-operated systems, and credit and debit card systems, more common for multi-space parking management solutions such as pay-and-display, lack the ability to charge users for precise parking usage, usually forcing users to overpay for their stay. In addition, existing enforcement methods result in uneven ticketing and disproportionate penalties because parking managers do not have the resources to patrol all areas equally, and parking control officers cannot distinguish between vehicles parked a few minutes or several hours beyond allowed limits.
Hence, there are many benefits for having an automated parking usage measurement system that monitors parking activity remotely. Such a system would provide data for efficient and fair enforcement of parking, and facilitate convenient payment options for all end users of the system.
Prior to this invention, people have attempted vehicle sensing solutions that incorporate sensors as extensions of a traditional parking meter or multi-space meters. These sensors are usually directly wired into parking meters, and the resulting occupancy data is immediately consumed by individual meters instead of communicated back to a central location. As a result, parking space managers are unable to effectively use the occupancy data generated for policy and enforcement optimizations. In addition, while these wired sensing solutions are technologically simple and are made of rather inexpensive parts, the labor cost of installing these sensors is prohibitively expensive due to the cost of wiring, making them rather unpopular even in the most comprehensive parking management systems. One natural and obvious improvement to address this problem is to make all the sensors wireless. A slightly more efficient implementation would involve wireless sensors and a nearby base station to collect the sensor data, such that the power requirement at the sensors is reduced. Nevertheless, these wireless sensors are still too bulky for convenient installation, and their lifetime and reliability are insufficient for most applications.